Picking the right time to broach a touchy conversational topic demands vigilance; talking about the very real and growing issue of football brain injuries in a culture that has elevated the sport to “sacred cow” status is a bracing endeavor; a “brave endeavor,” someone even told me the other day. Everyone winces, because they are fully aware of Junior Seau, Steve Gleason, Ray Easterling and the burgeoning roster of injured or dead-by-suicide ex-NFLer’s, but to actually talk about it? Aw, come on; that’s wussy stuff!

Those who might take that deflective, head-bangingly dense position on a topic that should capture our attention have got a spokesperson in none other than the grandly eloquent Glenn Beck, who decided the President’s pre-Superbowl comments on the issue in interviews with the New Republic and CBS’s Scott Pelley merited some withering and oh-so-cutting-edge critique:

Beck played back sections of the Pelley interview, interjecting the word “girl” and phrases like “He’s a girl!” while the president spoke, then shifted his voice up to a soprano register. At the end of the CBS interview, he lit into Obama with a full barrage of schoolyard taunts.

Dear God, kids, there goes the nation because without his official Glenn Beck-authorized “man card,” the President is Samson without hair, Wolverine without claws, and Spiderman without web goo.

Wow.

Because I trust your intelligence–certainly more than Glenn Beck does–let me share the President’s comments on football, and let you decide what to make of them:

I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.

I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about. [Source]

WHAT A GIRL, RIGHT??

Here is more of Glenn Beck’s insightful, mature response to the President’s perspective:

He went on to criticize Obama’s tendency to give lengthy “philosophical” answers to questions, “like a little spider weaving a little web,” which Beck held up as further evidence of the president’s unmanliness.

“You’re a full-fledged woman. I never heard anybody but a woman say that,” he continued. “Stop being such a chick, Mr. President. Stop it. You’re commander-in-chief. Not chick-in-chief.”

I guess he hasn’t read any sports injury-related analysis from countless sports writers, sports doctors, or family members and loved ones of the dead and injured. Lots of manly men in that bunch; when you take a look at my article on the topic, you can take note of that.

Let’s take a moment now to give you a view of an actual journalist’s response to the President. Here’s the Scott Pelley interview:

Beyond the status quo ignorance of Bilious Beck’s asinine, schoolyard bully vernacular, his clod-hopper density about an issue that is moving front and center for a great many people besides the President is astonishing. For a “journalist” to display such contempt for a seminal issue which is currently very much in the public conversation–and to dismiss something that bears thoughtful, honest examination–just proves further that Glenn Beck is not actually a journalist, but is, rather, an “ignorance-provocateur” whose goal is expound rather than explore, demean rather than define, and insult rather than illuminate.

4 Comments

Aside from the fact that he’s got the looks and mental capacity of a large infant, perhaps Beck needs to be informed that there are a few NFL players that donated their brains to science for the very reasons the President mentions. http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-204_162-10007027.html But of course, Glennypants has never been known to bother with facts.